Monthly Report: October (Patreon)

The first version of the Benchmark system released this month, plus a minor bugfix release. Seems it was pretty successful in terms of downloads for new Hub resource (currently at 1.7K), reviews and active discussion going on in the designated thread on the Hub. Not successful in terms of Patreon pledges, though. I have lost some 30% earnings before tax over the last 6 months. Apparently that is reward in this community, if you dump out your work for free. But of course, if you read this, you are on of my current 282 subscribers and you are appreciated!

A common complaint, if you can call it like that, was that people are asking for a scene with more than a single character. I agree its needed for a better representation of a "normal scene" and have started to work on that last week, see screenshot above. The current plan is a one-minute-plus HJ scene with 3 characters. The idea is to run it two or three times, like with AdvancedColliders and SoftBodyPhysics turned on/off....something like that. Since I'm not that familiar yet with Timeline and keep thinking in terms of IdlePoser, its slow going, so it may be a while. I'm still experimenting around how to best build this. Maybe I just animate it in Timeline, which is tedious....or I build it in IdlePoser but then record it into Timeline, not sure.

Another thing I need to look into is to turn off the PhysicsUpdateCap entirely or at least set it to a lot higher limit than "3". There have been some people running the Benchmark on low-end systems, achieving less than 20fps. Due to the way VaM works, at that point it will show you  "20 fps" while actually being slower as well as skipping physics updates, so taking shortcuts and not doing the full work. These results are pretty much useless. Thankfully I think I spotted a hack I could use to force VaM to behave properly. However, I have not actually tried, so it might not work.

Cheers,

MacGruber